1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to interactive user tools on a distributed communication network, such as the Internet. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for enabling users of content on a distributed communication network to collectively indicate the degree of helpfulness or usefulness of individual items of contents, such as for example reviews of commercially available products and/or services, usenet postings, news articles, etc., by interactively voting or indicating that particular items of content were helpful or otherwise valuable to the user. Subsequent users then are able to sort retrieved items of content by degree of helpfulness or usefulness according to the number of previous users who have indicated that the individual items of content were helpful or otherwise valuable.
2. Background and Related Art
It is generally known in the art to survey consumers regarding the quality of particular products and/or services, and to publish or advertise the results of the survey. Recently, with the rapid technological advancement of the Internet, it has become possible for individual consumers to provide narrative reviews of products and/or services, in addition to standardized scaled ratings. Such reviews can be stored in a server database and retrieved and displayed to users (clients) in response to search queries using known search engines.
As the number of individual consumers participating in on-line product ratings and posting product reviews continues to grow, so does the amount of information available for subsequent users to evaluate.
In addition to consumer reviews or ratings 6f products and services, it is possible to retrieve a very large of amount of information from the Internet relating to any subject at all. For example, information can be retrieved in the form of usenet postings, professional reviews, news articles, on-line catalogs, video and audio clips, etc.
Consequently, there exists a need in the art to provide a methodology by which users may indicate the particular helpfulness or usefulness of certain individual items of content, whereby subsequent users will be able to sort available reviews by the degree of indicated helpfulness or usefulness, and thereby reduce the amount of information for the user to evaluate, based on the prior experience of other users.